Friday, April 20, 2007

I just realized that I’ve been posting about fruits for the past two Weekend Herb Blogging. Well, these lovely fruits seems to be taking turns to appear on the supermarket shelves. It’s really difficult to walk past them without transferring one or two packs into my shopping trolley.

This week’s WHB is no exception (sorry, I guess the above is just an excuse for my lack of ideas). Hosted by our lovely Sherthis week, to entice her (hopefully), I thought a glorious-coloured fruit might do the trick.

Here I present the dragonfruit – also known as pitaya and 火龙果.

These are fruits of the cactus species, and the ‘scaly’ skin encloses a soft flesh studded with many black seeds, similar to those in a kiwi fruit. There are three varieties - pinkish skin with white flesh, pinkish skin with red-purplish flesh, and the last is yellow skin with white flesh. Dragonfruits are native to Mexico as well as Central and South America, but are also cultivated in asian countries now, with Vietnam being a major exporter of the fruit(Anh, correct me if I’m wrong :p).

I didn’t like dragonfruits at all previously, because I find the taste too bland for my liking. That was until I tried the red-fleshed variety. It was sweeter than the white-fleshed fruits, and I began to appreciate the subtle sweetness of this fruit, and the crunchy black seeds too.

The best and easiest way to enjoy this fruit is to cut it into half(chilled it well first), scoop out the flesh and enjoy it by the spoonful. But that’s so ‘not-interesting’ for this post right? So digging into my fridge ……………..I found kiwi fruit…..wait wait…..and pineapple. Okay, cube these fruits and pile them into the ‘shell’ left behind from the scooping. So here is my colourful Dragon Boat.

Please don’t forget to visit Sher for the re-cap of all the entries, and of course hop over to Kalyn’s Kitchen for more details on WHB.

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comments:

I said "wow" as soon as I saw these pictures. The colors are so bright, it's a feast for the eyes. The only bad part is that I've never seen these magnificent looking fruits anywhere! I feel very deprived! :):) Thank you for sharing those with us. This is now on my list of fruits I have to try!

my mom eats dragonfruit practically everyday! That time I tasted it, kinda disliked it (same reason as yours). But I trust I will change my mind very soon once I get find this red variety! And I love your idea of using its own skin as container, really very theme-orientated and pretty!(psst... no worry about no time in making bread, you're si-fu, still a si-fu, once you make one I know it must be a wow-one!)

Angie, I want to book a ticket to go back to Vietnam straightaway after seeing your post! Dragonfruit is fabulous. You can try it in a taro perl sweet soup or blend into a smoothie (especially nice when combined with custard apples). :D

I think dragonfruits are cultivated mostly in Southern Vietnam and it is very popular there. Not sure if Vietnam is the major exporter. But it is so abundant, I am not surprised.

When I was 17-year-old, I was a dragonfruit promoter! That's the first time I know about this fruit. There's some way to differentiate the cactus plant between red & white flesh. My boss gave me 2 and I plant them outside of my place. They just kept growing, just like a cactus, but no fruits at all.